


The Thought That Drives Me Forward (You)

by Jaded



Series: Mutual Pining in Space [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Let's be grown-ups about this even though it sucks, More mutual pining in space, Navigating adulthood and war is hard enough without love getting in the way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 10:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10384938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaded/pseuds/Jaded
Summary: After they survive Scarif, Cassian wakes on Yavin IV with someone else waiting for him who is not Jyn, yet all he wants is her.From the prompt fill: "Cassian is romantically involved with someone else when he meets Jyn." Companion piece to "This Is How It Happens (We Were Born to Burn)."





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to ["This Is How It Happens (We Were Born to Burn),"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10336866) which is Jyn's POV on the same events.

_Jyn._

 

  
It’s the thought of her that drives him forward, that keeps his legs from buckling.

 

  
The Citadel rises high into the sky and Cassian can see what feels like the whole of Scarif laid out before him. But he’s not looking to the sky or to the way the land crests into the horizon.

 

  
The deck is wet with blood, and fear strangles him as he tries to stagger along the platform to find her. He can barely breathe, and he holds his wound as though it’s the only thing keeping him from collapse, save for the thought: _Jyn. Where is Jyn?_

 

  
And he sees her a moment after he sees the man in white, and his next step is easy. The look on her face as the Imperial drops is worth every lance of pain that cut through him on the climb up, worth falling to pieces and dying here if that’s his fate.

 

  
But he doesn’t die here. He doesn’t die today.

 

  
Jyn stumbles toward him, smiling like a child. He wants to hold her and never let her go.

 

  
+

 

  
His dreams are an ocean of morphine, the waves of relief and numbing washing across his body in between fits of consciousness. When he does wake–brief interludes between sleep–he continues a conversation with the med droid that spans what he finds to be two days when it seems like only minutes. He can smell the humid air and the spicy scent of blueleaf that lets him know he is back on Yavin IV. _Safe,_ he thinks. _Home._

 

  
Cassian feels weightless. It would be so easy to float away, but he doesn’t. In his delirium, he thinks Jyn is there with him, and she anchors him.

 

  
_(Are you with me?_

  
_All the way.)_

 

  
_Jyn,_ he thinks, as he drifts away again.

 

  
+

 

  
He wakes and hears the med droid’s angry beeping. Warm hands touch his face. “You are not authorized,” the droid buzzes in the distance.

 

  
“Captain.” He hears Jyn’s voice and thinks she is speaking to him. He struggles to move, but his body is too heavy, weighed down by drugs and who knows how many days of inactivity. “If you’ll excuse me.” The doors of his room whoosh shut, and the sound of her quick and purposeful steps fade away.

 

  
He feels hands on his face again, and the touch is gentle. When he is able to open his eyes, he sees that it is Captain Rois—no, Khelda. He has to remind himself sometimes that they agreed to be less formal with one another when they are alone, but their time time together has always been so brief, it is easy to forget.

 

  
“Cassian!” she breathes, and the softness he hears sounds so foreign after all the brutality he’s witnessed.

 

  
He feels her hands against his face again and his eyes fall close.

 

  
+

 

  
Bodhi visits him first when he’s getting ready to be discharged. He pats Cassian awkwardly on the shoulder and calls him Captain, not Cassian, but his relief is genuine and bright. Baze and Chirrut follow, and it is only then that Jyn sees him. She hangs back behind the two Guardians and says very little.

 

  
He reminds himself they’ve only known each other now two weeks and that she owes him nothing. But his debt to her feels heavy and endless, and he wants to pay her back. He just doesn’t know how.

 

  
Chirrut stares at Cassian with his ever-knowing, sightless eyes and raises an eyebrow before he turns his head to look pointedly at Jyn.

 

  
When they are gone, Kaytoo comes in with a box of his personal effects and remarks, “Did you inform your compatriots about your current status with Captain Rois?”

 

  
“My _current status_?”

 

  
“There have been questions,” Kaytoo says simply. “My programming does not allow me to answer anymore personal questions for you now that you are awake.”

 

  
Cassian hears the _anymore_ and doesn’t have to ask who posed the question.

 

  
+

 

  
He’s taken off active duty while he recovers and hobbles around the base in between Bacta treatments. All the while he watches as Bodhi flies off on missions and Chirrut and Baze train new recruits on weapons and hand-to-hand. And Jyn. She stays with the Rebellion, though she leaves him over and over again, rarely without a goodbye, throwing herself into danger as though she is testing her own invincibility.

 

  
She stumbles off the back freighters holding up Kes Dameron the way she once held him up on Scarif, and he feels numb inside watching from a distance. He tells himself again that he has no right to any part of her. She’s given him too much already, and the Rebellion—and him by extension—has taken so much away from her. That she stays is a miracle in itself, that she fights so hard, is something else.

 

  
When he had met her, he had seen in her a fire that burned him up inside. He thinks of her that way still–as the light that will never go out. He’s the shadow that it casts.

 

  
+

 

  
When Khelda returns from her three-week mission on Lothal, she joins him for meals again. He sits quietly as she becomes more animated about a raid on an Imperial prison and an extraction there that almost went bad.

 

  
He feels half asleep, and she wakes him up by reaching out and touching his shoulder.

 

  
“You okay?”

 

  
“Yes.” A lie.

 

  
The mess hall buzzes with the noise of mealtime: tin cups and the slap of the slop that passes for food. Khelda grows quiet and asks him another question. It’s one that they’ve all asked each other at least once before. In the past, his answers have always been about the cause. It isn’t this time.

 

  
“What did you think about, on Scarif, when you thought you were going to die?” Khelda asks. She knows some of the story, but not all of it.

 

  
His eyes drift over to Jyn across the mess when he answers. It is simple, altogether too honest, but he says it anyway. “That I wanted to live.”

 

  
+

 

  
The death of Alderaan feels like the end of all things.

 

  
The Death Star. It’s no longer a whisper or a rumor.

 

  
Cassian’s forgotten how to mourn, but this reminds him how. He walks across until his feet ache, and he doesn’t stop until he finds Jyn alone in the hanger. He’s been looking for her without knowing it, but he can’t make that last step to hold her. Her shoulders shake, but there is only silence in his ears.

 

  
_Had nothing they done been worth anything?_ he wonders, but he looks at her, small and alone and still so warm and bright that he thinks, _it has to._

 

  
+

 

  
They’ve both been avoiding one another, but circumstances pull them together for briefings and when they are in the company of others. She hands him a data pad and he takes it. They make a point not to touch.

 

  
“Try not to get yourself killed,” Baze growls at Jyn as they leave the briefing room. She laughs. Cassian has missed that sound. It cuts through him now like a million shards of glass.

 

  
“It’s just a routine scouting mission,” she says.

 

  
But it never is, and he later has to watch as she’s rushed off a transport on a stretcher, voices screaming for triage and for all the extra blood that is available. He’d hold out his arm and give her all of his, but he knows she wouldn’t accept it.

 

  
+

 

  
“What are we doing?” Khelda asks. She sits on his cot in his quarters and pulls off her boots. The lights are dim and they both need sleep.

 

  
Cassian rubs his eyes. “What do you mean?”

 

  
Her lips thin and Khelda tilts her head with exasperation. “You’re a good spy, Cassian,” she says, “but I’m just as good.”

 

  
“Then just ask me the question,” he says.

 

  
Instead, she says casually in the practiced way of Intelligence, “Did you hear about Melshi and Erso?”

 

  
He stiffens. He doesn’t have to know what it is to know what it is. It’s not the specifics that matter but the person.

 

  
“I could be making it up,” she says quietly, “But I’m not.”

 

  
“I’ve been unfair to you,” he says after a pause.

 

  
“You have.”

 

  
“And I have been unfair to myself,” he echoes.

 

  
“You have.”

 

  
A sigh escapes his lips and he sits down next to her. Khelda begins relacing her boots.

 

  
Her head drops to her chest. “What are we doing?” she asks again. It’s a prompt this time, not a question.

 

  
Cassian takes her hand and grips it. “We’re ending it.”

 

  
+

 

  
On his first mission back on active duty, he almost gets blown to bits, and he almost misses the destruction of the Death Star at the hands of farmer from the Outer Rim. But Cassian lives another day, and he feels glad for the first time in a long time.

 

  
Jyn’s been in Chandrila and he hasn’t seen her for weeks, but when he’s discharged yet again from the med bay, he knows she’s on base and he has to see her. When he finds her, she’s not alone, and he realizes he’s not sure what to say to her or if she wants to even hear it. The moment of hesitation is one moment of cowardice in twenty years, and he feels every moment of it himself when he turns and walks away from her.

 

  
+

 

  
He doesn’t even have to ask but he’s told. “She’s outside.” Jyn. It doesn’t matter who says it to him.

 

  
Cassian finds her curled up beneath a massassi tree next to a crumbling stone pillar lying on its side.

 

  
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. And I’ve been avoiding you, he thinks.

 

  
“You’re an excellent spy,” she says. He looks into her blinking green eyes as she slowly wakes.

 

  
Dawn begins to creep into the sky behind her, blushes of pink against the inky sky.

 

  
He crouches next to her and plucks a dead leaf from her hair. She flinches and he freezes mid-air.

 

  
“Jyn.” His bravery finds footing at last. He reaches up to touch her face. Her skin is soft against his rough hands.

 

  
She struggles ever so slightly before she stops, and her pupils grow dark. “Don’t,” she says. “It’s … too early for this.” He almost lets go, but she’s searching his eyes she’s not disgusted—she’s afraid, the same way he’s been afraid.

 

  
His lips curl up and he shakes his head. “Not too early,” he says, and then he dares. “I hope … that I am not too late?”

 

  
“And Captain Rois?” she asks, and he knows that they are on the same page.

 

  
“It’s over,” he says. “It’s been over since the moment you stole my blaster, truthfully. But I had to end it and do right by Khelda. It just took some time.”

 

  
“I didn’t find a holo of her in your bag,” Jyn says. Her voice is fierce and full of fire.

 

  
“I didn’t carry one.”

 

  
“You’re not sentimental,” she observes, and he thinks, _I didn’t use to be._

 

  
He shrugs and says, “Maybe I am.” He opens his jacket and pulls from a pocket a slightly beaten-up holo of her face when she used to be Liana Hallik. “I carried it with me when we were trying to find you.”

 

  
“And you forgot it was there?” she asks, her voice unsure.

 

  
He shakes his head. He hopes he’ll never have to find her again, that she’ll always be by his side.

 

  
The sun rises, a burst of gold on the horizon. “Oh,” she mouths, and he runs a thumb over her lip, feels her sigh on his hands.

 

  
He wants to hold her and never let her go, and when he leans in and kisses her, he knows that she feels the same way about him.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Wanna find me on tumblr? I'm @operaticspacetrash


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